ANKARA (AP) - A court convicted a man yesterday of killing a 2-year-old British boy and a Turkish man, and sentenced him to 36 years in prison, the boy’s family said. Daimi Akyuz told the court he was sorry and expressed regret for the killings, private NTV television reported. Earlier in the year, Akyuz told the court that he pulled out his gun only to scare the man he was fighting and that the gun went off by mistake. Two-year-old Alistair Grimason, from East Kilbride, Scotland, was killed by a stray bullet as he slept in his pram while his family was on vacation in Foca, an Aegean city about 50 kilometers (30 miles) north of the port city of Izmir. A Turkish man, Ali Bektas, was also killed in the shooting, and two others were wounded.

MOSUL (Reuters) - A Turkish oil tanker driver was killed and another apparently kidnapped after an attack over the weekend on their convoy heading to the northern Iraqi city of Mosul, relatives and an Iraqi official said yesterday. Relatives said Mohammed Omar, 30, was seized when his convoy of oil tanker trucks was attacked by men in four civilian cars shortly after midday on Saturday. Two trucks were destroyed and one of the drivers was killed, relatives and other truck drivers said.

Two Kurdish rebels were killed in a clash with Turkish troops and a Turkish soldier was wounded in a separate firefight in eastern Turkey, an official said yesterday. Turkish troops carrying out an operation in a mountainous area of Bitlis fought guerrillas from the Kurdistan Workers Party (PKK) on Sunday night, killing two. The official said PKK rebels also attacked a military post in an outlying area of Tunceli province on Sunday night, injuring one soldier. (Reuters)

A leading international human rights group yesterday criticized the Croatian judicial system for serious flaws in the prosecution of war crimes cases, particularly against minority ethnic Serbs. In one of a series of reports on justice in the Balkans, Human Rights Watch said there was a “bias and lack of professionalism” in most war crimes cases in Croatia. (AP)

A landslide at a coal mine in Kosovo killed two workers yesterday, a police spokesman said. The two victims were working in an open pit outside the town of Obilic, 10 kilometers (6 miles) northwest of the provincial capital, Pristina, when the landslide occurred just after midnight, said Refki Morina, a spokesman for the Kosovo police. The two were rushed to a hospital, where they died of their injuries. (AP)